Does this matter for the labor market? Yes, although not yet visible. A company that delays investments such as improving energy efficiency or measuring emissions and reducing them risks not only increasing electricity and heat bills, but also deepening difficulties in financing its operations and investments with loans. Western contractors also look at the carbon footprint of their products – and are inclined to choose suppliers or collaborators who will ensure a lower level. There are more and more consumers for whom environmental and climate issues are so important that they become one of the criteria for purchasing choices. Therefore, neglecting environmental issues becomes a simple path to the gradual collapse of the company, which is also reflected in subsequent waves of employment reductions.
New technologies are flexing their muscles
In industry, as much as 62 percent managers recognize automation and robotics as key investment priorities for the coming year. A slightly smaller group recognizes that technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning or virtual/augmented reality create new opportunities in the field of employment. It can be assumed that the idea is to employ specialists skilled in working with these technologies, but also to reduce jobs (or vacancies) that machines will be able to effectively replace.
Digital automation has had a particularly painful impact on the technology industry this year: around 240,000 people had to leave their jobs around the world. employees of this industry. While increasingly sophisticated digital technologies are quite naturally leaving their mark on the IT market, in the coming months they will be entering new industries and appearing in new roles. An example here would be the streaming service Spotify, which boasted of entrusting AI with adapting user profiles to their tastes and needs, and almost at the same time fired about 1.5 thousand people. employees – 17 percent employed in the company. Skeptics respond with a colorful formula: artificial intelligence will not replace employees, rather employees who can use AI will replace those who cannot.
Purely theoretically, employers are increasingly willing to experiment with robotics or artificial intelligence at various levels of their organization’s structures. These are undoubtedly, to a large extent, attempts at reconnaissance before potentially transferring some of the duties performed by humans today to technology. Indeed, reports from companies such as Randstad show that a huge – over 90% – most employers around the world have more or less specific intentions to reduce employment. Perhaps this trend also includes the phenomenon of quiet cutting, i.e. reducing teams “quietly”, by liquidating organizational units in the company or transferring employees to lower-paid positions – in the hope that they will look for a new job themselves.
But on the other hand, experts also reassure us that although we increasingly often come across bots asking how they can help, in an area where human intuition is needed (and the ability to understand what is going on to a customer who cannot explain what point), AI will not replace humans. Therefore, it is difficult to believe that customer service centers will experience any catastrophic reduction. Specialists also indicate that it will be difficult to replace people in professions related to, among others: with the construction industry, logistics – especially driving and health care.
Pros and cons of hybrid work
The pandemic has brutally broken the stereotype that assumes – as the popular saying goes – that your eye makes the horse fat. Suddenly it turned out that a significant number of people employed in companies are able to perform their duties from home or anywhere outside the office. And entrepreneurs, largely grumbling, finally came to terms with it. The “return to offices” announced at the end of the Covid-19 expansion turned out to be only partial. According to the Gallup research center, while in 2019 60 percent people who could perform their work remotely worked at the company’s headquarters, in 2023 there were only 20 percent of such people.
2023-12-27 03:38:56
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